Battery Replacement

The frustration of a dead battery will be familiar to most phone owners. But what can you do to avoid it, other than use your phone less?

Apple is good at squeezing maximum performance out of the hardware in the iPhone and that’s one of the reasons that the iPhone’s battery is comparatively small. The first iPhone had a 1400mAh battery, and seven years later the iPhone 6 has a 1810mAh battery, although the iPhone 6 Plus has a whopping 2910mAh offering.

Until the next big leap in battery or charging technology comes along, we’ll have to rely on smarts to get the most out of our iPhones. Here are a few simple tips you can follow to get a whole lot more juice from your Apple smartphone.

1. Keep an eye on signal strength

The biggest culprit for rapid battery drain is often a weak signal, but there isn’t a great deal you can do about that. If you’re in an area with a poor signal then you might consider switching Airplane mode on, which stops the constant searching that sucks the life from your phone.

You should always use Wi-Fi instead of cellular data whenever possible, as that offers a more stable connection and will stop all that battery-abusing searching for a signal.

2. Turn off app notifications

Some apps will spam you with pointless news. How many of the notifications you get do you actually want to see? In most cases, very few.

Every one of them is sucking down some battery life, so cut them off at the source. Go to settings > notification centre and tap on any apps you don’t want notifications from. Then choose ‘none’ under the alert style, and turn ‘badge icon’ and ‘sounds’ off.

3. Change display settings

Your display is costly to power, so you want it to shut down quickly when you aren’t using it.

Go to Settings > General > Auto-lock and see if you can live with a shorter time before the screen auto-locks.

You should also head to Settings > Wallpaper & brightness and turn ‘Auto-brightness’ off to save some battery. Set the brightness as low as you can and only adjust it up when needed and you’ll save a decent chunk of power – although this might mean you can’t always see your phone screen in direct sunlight.